12/17/2010

online web critics and defamation

Coping with On-line Critics

Basically every single and every company large and little definitely will get at least a few critics after a handful of years of operations, who could post their views for the earth to discover in an effort to disparage the organization they do not really like. Quite often the critics have legitimate criticisms, and other instances the remarks might be libelous, having already been posted by resentful purchasers or rivals who want to harm the business by lying.Whatever the case may be, online criticism of a business signifies a problem for entrepreneurs. Depending on the circumstance, there are a couple of steps which usually will be used to battle back against criticism against a enterprise.

Defamation Lawsuits

If the feedback are generally false and detrimental, the case for defamation could possibly often be made. This is normally a long process unless the identity of the commenter is known, because it involves a prolonged discovery procedure when trying to identify the defendant from their on-line username.If a defamation case is successful, it can result in an award of financial damages for the litigant, as well as an injunction against the defendant requiring them to remove the defamatory content that they have published.

Trademark/Copyright Lawsuits

In certain cases, web critics may violate trademark and copyright laws designed to protect your intellectual property in the course of publishing their material; they may infringe on your trademark rights by using a domain name that incorporates your brand name.Of course, not all brand name use is useful.... For example, PayPalSucks.com, a website which posts complaints about PayPal's services, is legal because there is no chance that it would be confusingly similar to anything PayPal owns, since the name clearly indicates a disparagement of their product. However, if someone registered, "PayPalPaymentSolutions.com" in order to entice people to arrive at a site which disparages the product, a case could be made that the domain name's use of the PayPal trademark could confuse patrons and infringe on PayPal's intellectual property rights.Nonetheless, sometimes a threshold can be crossed and it can cause an inordinate amount of copyrighted works to be misused thereby removing any option of a fair use defenese. You may consider engaging in copyright litigation against them, or sending DMCA takedown notices to their host to get the content taken out.

Coping with Legal Criticism

Defamation isn't always a given.. In such a case, there are other tactics which can be used. Often, forums, online newspapers, and other websites which accept user submissions will have a Code of Conduct for their users which requires a higher standard to be met than simply not defaming someone. It may be worth sending them a letter complaining about a user's abusive comments, and letting the website decide whether they want to be the forum for that person's content. Sometimes, this may achieve good results, with the user's criticism being removed and not requiring litigation.

Not all is lost, as there may be a solution in hiring a reputation management company to clear your name. Just think of how much a business can suffer from negative comments about it.. Reputation management companies can work to take the step mentioned above about reporting the user, but they can also optimize certain keywords so that pages favorable to your business crowd out the bad content on the first pages of search engine results.ICANN even has a policy in place for dealing with domain name infringment.

Things to Consider

Not every strategy is the best approach for dealing with disparaging comments about your business. A few things should be taken into consideration when deciding what the best approach is to take:

• Cost.It can be expensive to engage in litigation, so think twice before jumping in head first. You should consider the cost versus the benefits (is there a good chance of winning, if you do win will it stop a major source of criticism, will you be able to collect if you win or is the defendant indigent , etc). If the cost is too high, you may want to consider cheaper alternatives like reputation management or sending a letter to the website which hosts the material if it violates their Terms of Service.

• Will you create further problems for yourself? If you commence litigation against a web-savvy person, you might just turn what was a relatively minor complaint into a cause célèbre of Internet dwellers. A publicity campaign may be waged against you by web users who are offended by your litigiousness and end up making you even worse off. A recent lack of understanding about copyright law by an editor of Cooks Source Magazine resulted in such a large Internet-based backlash that the magazine decided to shut down its operations.

• Long-term strategy. If web criticism is more than a minor event, it may be worth hiring a reputation management company to monitor criticism and take action against it on an ongoing basis.Hopefully this has been a useful overview of how to deal with web critics, but it is just that: an overview. For a more extensive evaluation of how to deal with web critics, you should consider consulting legal counsel and/or a reputation management company. For more information about coping with web critics, you can visit the website of an internet lawyer.